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The main reason I still have my Facebook account lately is not to keep up to date with friends, family and ex colleagues, but um…to play The Sims Social. I’m in an “inseparable” relationship with The Wife, I hate Bella, and I’m obsessive about the weeds in the garden (if only this were true in real life!)

One of the tasks that I have at the moment is to get a celebrity stalker. Except for some reason, you get a stalker by blogging. Uh huh.

5 blog posts…100 followers? I wish.

1000 followers for 10 mean blog posts? Easy. In light of this Jezebel article, perhaps the “celebrity” blogger part isn’t so unlikely?

“Steal pictures from other websites to make your blog look professional” – this one made me laugh the most, since I’m sure we’ve all had people steal photos from us before (and if you think you have, perhaps you should have a look at this blog post about tracking them down)

Back in the day (flipping heck, that makes me sound old!), I was a tad obsessed with Facebook. I honestly can’t remember when I first joined, but it was either while I was still at uni, or had just finished (I’m pretty sure it was back when you had to have an university email address for my uni). Back then, it was great. My uni had just blocked Xuqa and MySpace wasn’t as popular as it had been in our second year. Facebook was a neat, easy to use, site, and had a certain aura of exclusivity.

Without being snobby, that might be why I’ve lost interest. When we first started using Facebook, it was only available to certain people. You generally only connected with the people you were talking to at the time. Obviously as time goes on, you no longer see those people, but at least with Facebook, you can “reconnect”. No. No you wont.

Facebook opened up to everyone and anyone and that was great…at first. But as more people got on the site, the amount of pointless updates increased. I’m not claiming to be the most interesting person in the world. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know that. But – what do I mean here? People who use Twitter are generally a bit more internet savvy, they know the boundries on what is suitable to share on line (I just ate a nice bowl of chips) and not (I wuv my snugglums). Facebook users (and I am being VERY general here – I am not specifically saying “Bob is…”) are less knowing, and more likely to share the minutiae, often in hideous text speak. (There have honestly been times that I’ve seen a status update and had to think about what it could be translated as!)

I like to give something up for Lent, but most of the time, I can’t think of something that I want to give up, to see if I can manage without it. The last two times I’ve given something up were bread (that was a killer, especially because I love toast) and chocolate (which wasn’t as hard as I though, but did require some willpower, especially as I had to pass a vending machine full of chocolate everytime I made a brew.

This year, I decided to give up Facebook for some of the reasons above. I’ve not really missed it so far, although have becoming increasingly irritated with the site – if you disable your personal account, your fan page disappears as well. How clever. I had to set up a friendless account just to admin the page. Faff!

Have you given something up for Lent this year? Or did you give something up and have already broken?

Last night, Alex and I went to a preview showing of “The Social Network” at our local cinema. If you’ve not heard about this movie, its based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires”, which is the story about how Facebook was started. Normally when reviewing a film, I wouldn’t give away anything, just to say how much I enjoyed it, but with this one, you know the story already. What made it so interesting was the way that it was done.

The film starts with a breakup. Not the most usual start for a film, but it does set the scene to explain some of the later choices of Mark Zuckerberg makes. He goes back to his dorm room, and creates a sort of “hot or not” to compare the photos of other students, while blogging (on his LJ) about what he’s doing, and why he’s drunk at 10pm on a Tuesday. The site “Facemash” became a sucess, crashing the University network.

Three guys, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their friend Divya Narendra noticed this prank, and recruited Zuckerberg into “helping” them create a website called HarvardConnect (later ConnectU) Zuckerberg then created TheFacebook, and it spread across Harvard to other big universities in the US, and later on in Europe.

In between scenes of how things happened back in 2003/2004, we are given shots from inside attorneys offices a few years later. The ConnectU team had a lawsuit against Zuckerberg claiming that he stole the idea for Facebook from them. From the film, it seems like he took their idea and built on it a bit more. But it could be argued that ConnectU was building on the ideas that led to MySpace and Friendster. The quote in the trailer sums it up.

“If [ConnectU] were the inventors of Facebook, [they]’d have invented Facebook.”

In a separate lawsuit, Zuckerbergs best friend Eduardo Saverin is suing him for losing shares, something that we don’t really find out until towards the end of the film. When more venture capitalists were brought in for funding, Saverin’s shares were diluted, but the other shareholders ones were not.

I really enjoyed the film. However, its not an action packed movie. I’m a bit of a business and company history geek, so it was interesting to see how this was brought to “the big screen”. Theres no eye candy (besides Justin Timberlake, zomg, girly fan squeal here. Couldn’t stop thinking about the parody of him from this episode of Star Stories, especially around the 7:28 mark) and its not really a comedy (although there are a few bits I laughed at) Even so, I would still recommend this film to non-business geeks. I think most people have heard some of this story before, and its interesting to see it reenacted.

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